BOY that was a week. You might have noticed that I didn’t write a weeknote last weekend… well there’s lots of things going on at the moment that I can’t really talk about too much. I’ll no doubt have more to say about that some time soon, but in the meantime it just means that my time has been a bit fractured.
This week also saw me start a new job, as interim head of content at Russell Publishing. Russell – or RPL as everyone calls it internally – is a business to business publisher going through some change, and I’ve been brought on board to help develop some new content strategies and mentor the content team. I’m going to be with them for nine months, which I think should be enough to get the job done, and I’m only doing four days a week so I can continue to have enough time to work on some fiction and some other small projects.
It was slightly odd being back in a business environment after a few months where my time was basically my own. I’m only in the office two days a week (the company is staunchly hybrid, which is good) but it’s the first time for several months that I’ve been working around people like that.
To make things more fun, after my first day in the office – induction on Monday – I came home feeling really under the weather, shivering and aching, so I had to phone in sick on Tuesday. Great start! Not QUITE how I wanted things to go. But we go again this week, and it was nice to meet my direct reports.
What I’ve been writing this week
You might have noticed that the US Department of Justice is taking Apple to court. I know, it’s very much gone under the radar.Antitrust cases are just wonderful for journalists. When Microsoft was going through its cases with the DOJ and European Commission, back in the late 90s and early 00s, I spent quite a bit of time writing about it. So it seemed natural to write something which drew on that experience in terms of the expectations of the kind of stuff you’re going to read and the process it will go through.
I also had to write a post which – horror of horrors – disagreed with something Walt Mossberg had written. Walt is one of my technology journalism heroes. He basically defined the best way to write about technology products at a time when national newspapers really didn’t take computers seriously as something that needed reporting on.
What I’ve been reading this week
This has been that rarest of things: a two-book week. They were, though, two volumes of the same work: Dream Makers by Charles Platt. It’s a set of interviews with science fiction writers, originally published in 1980, and updated by Platt with more historical context – basically what happened next to each author.Apart from some annoying typos and unpleasant formatting (Platt is self publishing the ebook versions) it’s well worth the couple of quid each one will set you back. Everyone is in here, from Asimov and Clarke to members of the New Wave. Even L Ron Hubbard is there.
